


Risks

by Chloe_at_Eleusis



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: AU, Complete, F/M, Oneshot, Pre-Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-08
Updated: 2012-09-08
Packaged: 2017-11-13 19:58:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,211
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/507165
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chloe_at_Eleusis/pseuds/Chloe_at_Eleusis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There are all kinds of risks, and Hermione's invention of a dangerous potion produces a number of them over a two-year timespan. Romantic HG/SS if you squint. Oneshot, AU.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Risks

**Author's Note:**

> Does anyone really think I'm JK Rowling? *looks around at the conspicuously absent show of hands* No. I thought not.

"An Imperius potion."

"Yes, Professor."

"Extending your seventh-year research into the Dark Arts, Miss Granger? How—industrious—of you."

"Your pardon, sir. It would more properly be called an Imperius _Detection_ potion."

Lift of a silky black brow. "Ah." The creases at the edges of his narrow lips deepened, sure if rare forerunners of an incipient smile. "And the range?"

"So far, sir, the theory allows only two years. But if I'm allowed to move into the practical, I should eventually be able to extend it…"

An impatient grimace. "The _range_ , Miss Granger."

She bit down on her lip, her explanations, and her irritation at not being allowed to offer them. "The upper range, with the ingredients that will extend it farthest, is twenty years. But it is attainable only on those subjects whose body weight is over fifty kg."

The still-lifted brow was joined by the other. "A poison, Miss Granger?"

"No, sir…" The last word hung suspended, pinned midair by that anthracite gaze. She ducked her head and enunciated the rest carefully. "Poison _ous_ , sir, unless carefully titrated to body weight. Below fifty kg the LD50 is likely to be above one in ten. Too high a risk."

"I see. And the extensors?"

A small sigh. "Cyclohexanes, sir."

A long pause. "I see."

The scratch of quill on parchment. Her eyes jerked up from her study of the legs of his desk, widening as she beheld the final flourish of his signature. She'd presented him with such a risky solution as the only one available, and he hadn't enquired into her exploration of safer alternatives? Didn't question her thoroughness or conversance with the appropriate ingredients? "But, sir…"

His voice was quick, cutting, cold and sharp as a frozen scalpel. "Have I mistaken your desire to continue to the experimental brewing phase, Miss Granger?" His hand now lay flat on the parchment she had handed him, preventing her from removing it from his desk.

"No, Professor. Thank you, Professor." She took the parchment from under his fingertips as he pushed it towards her, already stepping backwards towards the door, though not yet giving him her back.

"Two weeks, Miss Granger."

The end of her "Yes, Professor," was barely a murmur as she whirled and hurried for the door, clutching the precious parchment close to her body.

* * *

"Miss Granger. What do you think you—pay attention to your surroundings, girl!"

The bang of the door coupled with the rich baritone behind her had made her start, though she had deliberately seated herself a foot away from the bench so that she would not lean on it. Therefore, she did not disturb her experimental apparatus; she merely half-fell, ungracefully, from her stool.

"Professor. I beg your pardon, I was—"

"What you _were_ , Miss Granger, was seated half-dozing with your back to a door you had neither locked nor alarmed in a building you know full well to be pregnable to Death Eaters. If this is the training of the vaunted Potter, it is astonishing that any of you survived that debacle in the Department of Mysteries."

Lowered eyes and a flaming blush. His devastating observations would be more endurable if they were less surgically accurate. And if she were able to respond with a few of her own. "Yes, sir. I'm sorry, sir."

"Spare me your contrition, Miss Granger. It is pointless unless it prompts a caution that may at some point save your scrap of a hide—a caution of which I increasingly despair. More to the point—it is past midnight. What in the name of Morgause are you doing out of the tower?"

On the other hand, his accuracy did sometimes waver—why did it always do so in a way which put her further in the wrong, and not less? "I informed Professor McGonagall that my brewing had entered the final phase, sir, and asked her permission to be out after curfew—"

His voice dropped into the purr she'd been unlucky enough to hear only a handful of times before, registering only a few notes above a true bass. "And _my_ permission, Miss Granger? The permission of the professor overseeing your project? To use his student laboratory past the appointed—"

She interrupted, desperation driving her foray into vocal rudeness, knowing full well that nothing remotely pleasant waited for her at the end of his train of thought. "It was on the proposal you signed, Professor—the last stage has to be continuous—and I sent you a message this afternoon to remind you."

His scowl unknit itself; his voice resumed its normal register as he pinched the bridge of his nose. "I see. I did not remember that clause of your proposal, and I had not read your note. My apologies, Miss Granger."

Her eyes widened. She searched his face for signs of illness—pain—the most feared professor at Hogwarts had just _apologized_ to her… surely he was ill…? She moved a step closer, wondering how many years of detention she'd earn for feeling his forehead.

He caught her round-eyed look and scowled again. "Do not make me regret having offered you basic courtesy, Miss Granger."

An apology from Professor Severus Snape to a graduating seventh-year was basic courtesy? She bit down on her lip, and her threatening smile, and suppressed the urge to pinch herself. "No, sir. I'll just move my notes to the other side of the bench."

As she turned her back to pick up her stool and her notes and returned his, "Good night, Miss Granger," she couldn't contain her grin any longer.

* * *

"On… on you, sir?" Her voice had risen to a squeak of horror. She knew she sounded like a first-year, but she couldn't contain her reaction. The first human test of a potion on her Potions Master? Worse still, the first test of _this_ Imperius Detection Potion on a man who had undergone so many Dark curses in his past?

"Do use your common sense, Apprentice Granger. Traditionally it is either you or I, and you don't have the weight to safely…"

His voice trailed off as she deliberately looked away from him. _If only that would be useful_ , she thought grimly; he didn't need Legilimency when he could read her bloody open countenance. "You weren't intending to—damn it, girl, what kind of bloody fool—"

Her gaze snapped to his, brows flying to her hairline; even during her most spectacular mishaps as his Apprentice, she had never heard him curse. Well, not intelligibly.

Her voice was icy with an hauteur perfected under eight years of his tutelage. "I am perfectly capable of titrating a potion correctly, Master Snape—I've done it dozens of times in the past month alon—"

"Not a potion like this!" His voice was thunderous, a roar she'd heard described—by Harry—but had never really believed existed. Her breath caught on the last consonant.

"You addlepated, lackwitted _dolt_ of a girl! You wanted to try a potion that you know better than anyone has a better than fifteen per cent chance of killing you no matter how perfectly titrated? Have I taught you nothing? Can you value your own life so little as to risk it heedlessly when there is a more suitable subject at hand?"

Her famous temper finally snapped, her shriek of fury less voluble but no less enraged than his. "And if we're to talk of heedless risks, _sir_ , what about the one you're proposing? You can't be so obtuse as to imagine that greater body weight makes you a _more suitable subject_! You know that there's a risk of echoing every Unforgiveable that has ever been cast on you! You know full well that the weight of those curses may kill you just as fully and a great deal more painfully than benzene poisoning will do me! You propose a risk more heedless than mine! And you are a Potions Master, your worth to the Guild is proven—"

At the word "worth" his lips drew back over his teeth in a truly fearsome snarl. "You are bound to my will, girl. How dare you question—"

"You bloody great bully! Don't try that one on me, Severus Snape. I'm bound to your orders as your Apprentice, but there is nothing to stop me destroying my notes on an originally-conceived potion and destroying every last sample. You cannot force me to recreate it. It is _mine_ , and I can remove even the remotest possibility or need for testing it…"

"Don't be more of an imbecile than you must, girl." His voice was once more the deep, silky purr she'd gotten to know all too well since beginning her Apprenticeship. "You know full well that that potion is the reason I accepted you as Apprentice. What do you think will happen to your future if you destroy it?"

She blinked, then smiled grimly—and watched _him_ blink. If he thought threatening to destroy her future Potions career would cow her, then he'd underestimated her for, very possibly, the last time.

She spoke in fair approximation of his smooth tones. "I think, _Mister_ Snape, that you will terminate my Apprenticeship. You will also blackball me from the Guild and make it impossible for me ever to complete a Potions Mastery. And I will, in duty bound, inform Professor McGonagall of the circumstances underlying my termination and seek an Apprenticeship in a field in which I have less interest. I will leave your service having made a permanent and dangerous enemy…"

She turned from him and, with lightening speed and in a guttural murmur, cast upon the door of her private workspace the finely-tuned warding charms she had gotten, in repayment of some rather heavy medicinal potions, from Bill Weasley. He had assured her that no-one in Hogwarts save Filius Flitwick would be able to break them. Once she left here, she would stop by his office to make certain that he would not.

She heard her Master's step on the stones behind her and sheathed and locked her wand at her side before turning to face him. She offered him a brittle smile as she beheld his face, taut with rage, and finished her thought.

"…but I will leave you alive."

And she turned her back on him, without his permission, and left him standing there.

* * *

His voice from her hearth was deep and weary. "You cannot leave the castle without my permission until you have formally terminated your bond to me."

She paused in her packing, her back still to him, and straightened her shoulders. Between her fight with Snape and her subsequent interviews with McGonagall and Flitwick, it had been an exhausting three hours. "I rather thought you would have taken care of that already, sir."

"Severus."

She spun to face him, her mouth dropping open in surprise. "Sir?"

"No—Severus."

She saw the creases beside his mouth deepen slightly before he spoke again. "If you are to be my Apprentice no longer, there is no point in retaining formality."

Her mouth clamped itself shut as she forced herself to refrain from pointing out that the absence of formality did not immediately entail intimacy, which is what the use of first names was. He would only think such an observation inane.

"I do not wish to quit your service—Sev—sir. I only refuse to test the potion on you. If the only way to prevent that is by leaving your service…"

His brows drew together. "It is not. But I also refuse to let you test it upon yourself."

She hesitantly proffered the more logical choice that had occurred to her as soon as she left his office and that she was certain, after repeatedly insulting him, she would not have a chance to present. "It cuts against custom, sir, but we could—we are not explicitly prevented from asking for volunteers. From among the Order. People above the correct bodyweight and whose self-reports about Unforgiveables cast on them would be reliable."

He sighed. "May I have a seat, Apprentice Granger?"

"You may, sir." He slumped into the large armchair facing her hearth, head hanging as he pinched the bridge of his nose. "That is—an acceptable method of finding a test subject. I—apologize—for my earlier loss of temper. I did not want—I could not—allow-"

He stood again, facing her fireplace. The lines of his back were rigid with strain. "The thought of your death—of watching, for such a small—when I could have prevented it… your," she heard him swallow, "your—safety—is very important to me."

He reached for the Floo powder on her mantel as a small spark of—something—lit in her stomach. "I will see you tomorrow morning, Apprentice Granger."

She gulped and took a risk. "Hermione."

He half-turned to face her, astonishment showing in his eyes.

"I apologize for my insubordination as well; your safety is—important—to me too. And there is nothing in the contract that dictates forms of address outside the lab." She swallowed again, holding that coal-black gaze. "Severus."

He didn't smile. But his voice dropped again, and its quality was very different than the angry purr she'd heard just hours ago.

"Right you are. Hermione."

**FIN**

**Author's Note:**

> A modest little HG/SS bit from my exile. Your feedback is welcomed, and indeed cherished.


End file.
